Delicious day!

I am finally happy with the recipes that I made for today. Like I said, I cooked a lot this weekend but after last night’s grilled veggies I was worried about my new found vegan lifestyle. I thought I was destined to have bland vegetables the rest of my life.

Thankfully I have a wonderful cookbook called Veganomicon by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. I have lots of vegan and vegetarian cookbooks – I have always loved vegan cookbooks because they generally just have healthy recipes for whole foods. I have had this cookbook for awhile now and although I have read through it many times I haven’t really made anything except a couple of salad recipes (both delicious).

Yesterday I made two more – French Lentil Soup and Potato and Kale Enchiladas.

They describe the soup as the last lentil soup recipe you will ever need…. that statement couldn’t be more true. It has a lot of different herbs and spices in it, including paprika which I have never had in lentil soup before. It was delicious. I, being a terrible food blogger, do not have a picture. I brought about a cup of it with me to work with about 2 cups of raw spinach. I had them in the same container so when I warmed it up the spinach got wilted and I stirred it all together. Served it with a warm pita bread. It was a wonderful and filling lunch for about 380 calories.

For dinner I was coming home to Potato and Kale Enchiladas with Roasted Chile Sauce. The dish was fairly time consuming to make as there are many different components including a homemade chile sauce with three roasted Anaheim chili peppers. I roasted the peppers myself and I am so happy I took the time instead of buying canned chiles. Another thing that I was going to skip were the pumpkin seeds…. the recipe calls for the filling to have 1/4 cup of toasted pepitas, chopped coarsely. I happened to have some so I toasted them up and added. I baked all the goodness together. I took a little bit to sample and it tasted good, but the recipe promised to be even better the next day. I had to wait until 7:30 PM to find out….

Once again I forgot to take a picture, but I had to show you so I found one on line from the creators of the recipe:

Mine looked this good too!

SO YUMMY! The toasted pumpkin seeds in the filling were so good – they added a bit of crunch and texture with the mashed potatoes and kale. Everything really blended together. I am so pleased. I do not have the calorie count but there is nothing bad in this at all – a little bit of oil was used to saute the garlic and kale, but there is no other fat, no cheese, no sour cream, nothing. The dish tasted really rich – I didn’t miss a thing.

Today I had a great workout on the elliptical. It was steady-state cardio day so I had to do 30 minutes at 70% of my max heart rate. I have not been doing these workouts as consistently as I should because they do not make me feel like I am working hard enough but Core Performance said they are important for building endurance. These workouts do not cause the lactic acid build up in the muscles and train your heart to work at a steady pace. Since I am one to follow plans I will be more consistent.

Tomorrow is interval day which means speed work at the “track” (the back parking lot at work). It is the perfect place to get the speed workouts in and really one of my favorite workouts of the week.